The absence of preventable harm to a patient during health care provision process is referred to as patient safety. Nurses have a duty and a dedication to diseases prevention, healing and health promotion so as to ensure their patients get the highest level of care. The value of health care has led to an increased focus on health care and this is conducted through measures of quality and reimbursement and patient safety is increasingly based on performance and the outcomes reported online publicly (World Health Organization, 2012) . In the ethical imperative of safety, some of the major drivers are identified and formulated in this discussion. In nursing and health care, the utilitarian safety and the contradictory nature of individuals are defined as a challenge. In this discussion, the major focus is to discuss the ethical issues that impact patient safety phenomenon. A sustainable practice in which the humanity of every stakeholder is respected is provided through patient safety that is sensitive to ethics.
The underpinning ideas of Nightingale of ensuring patients are protected from bedside harm and the patient safety concern is not a new issue as it traces back to the 19 th century. Since early 90s, there has been significant emphasis on ethical patient safety (Runciman, Hibbert, Thomson R, et al. 2009). The significant emphasis on patient safety in nursing referred to healthcare providers’ ethical and knowledge-based foundations and adequate healthcare facilities with an aim of avoiding errors. During the last decade, much attention has been paid to patient safety by the administrators of healthcare (Sherman, Castro, & Fletcher, 2009). Therefore as a nursing student I would implement the following steps to ensure patient safety that affect nursing ethics are taken care of:
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Step 1: Ensure promotion of nurses is done through a vote by the nurses; this would help nurses work harder and ensure the ethics are not violated since they know their fellow nurses are their supervisors.
Step 2: Introduce employee of the month incentives among the nurses; this would ensure every nurse performs their duties with passion with an aim to win a prize.
Step 3: set a time frame for being a nurse leader; implementing this policy would give other young nurses motivation and their way up through the ranks to ensure they get the promotions since everyone gets a fair shot at the post.
Step 4: Set age limit for the nurses; implementing this policy will help many young nurses also get fair shot at the benefits enjoyed by the perceived older nurses. This will raise the morale of the nurses.
Step 5: In this step, I would make it mandatory for the patients who are served at the clinic to fill in a short questionnaire whether the service they received was according to their expectations and also write down the name of the nurse who served them. This will help the nurses give their best to ensure they their names do not end up in the bad books.
Step 6: At this final stage, I would ensure there is a disciplinary board which deals with bad conducts of nurses.
The steps I will put in place will ensure patient safety are protected and the nursing ethics are not violated since there will be fair shot at promotion. Additionally, there will be limit to the time frame a certain nurse can serve in a certain position to give every nurse a chance.
Maintaining, promoting and protecting the safety of care delivered to the general public is the major goal of health care system. Despite this objective, there has been no description of the ethical aspects of patient safety (European Union, 2012). Approaches taken in which a patient’s ethical safety aspects have been defined explicitly are referred to as ethical patient safety, conversely, patient safety is fundamentally ethical and has an implicit nature. Therefore, in terms of human dignity protection, authorizing and supervising ethical protocols implementation ethical patient safety can be viewed to relate to nursing management and as such it has a connection with human resource management in regards to education and competence.
There have been vital questions raised regarding rectifying practice errors and ethics of committing as upholding of patient safety has not been free from significant moral and legal risks to nurses (Khushf, Raymond & Beaman, 2008). This has led to numerous questions. This without a doubt leads to the necessity of nurses being more involved in information gathering and carrying out vital research on the safety of patients and ethics, as a result, it has led to the nurse managers coming up with strategies to improve the safety of patients in the clinic setting. The ethical imperative explores and formulates the major reasons for ethical patient safety. From an ethical perspective, there are two ways to consider health care system aims in regards to patient safety. They include;
Health care systems are understood in practical value; in this regards, the outcomes, benefits, economic drivers and effectiveness of the provided care matters. In this regards, health care burden and safety of patient is a reasonable way of cost reduction within the society.
With the emphasis of the humans role as the major argument and the aim of patient safety perceived as a moral value; safety of care is pursued with an aim to promote and protect human dignity. In regards to these two arguments, it can be concluded that the practical and ethical reasons for patient safety put together are capable of creating the major patient safety action imperative and cannot be separated as they are intertwined.
Conclusion
The value of health care has led to an increased focus on health care and this is conducted through measures of quality and reimbursement and patient safety is increasingly based on performance and the outcomes reported online publicly ( Johnstone, 2007) . The significant emphasis on patient safety in nursing referred to healthcare providers’ ethical and knowledge-based foundations and adequate healthcare facilities with an aim of avoiding errors. A sustainable practice in which the humanity of every stakeholder is respected is provided through patient safety that is sensitive to ethics. Therefore the practical and ethical reasons for patient safety put together are capable of creating the major patient safety action imperative and cannot be separated as they are intertwined.
References
European Union (EU) (2012). Council recommendation on patient safety, including the prevention and control of health-care associated infections (2009/C 151/01), http://ec.europa.eu/health/patient_safety/docs/council_2009_en.pdf (2009, accessed October 2012)
Johnstone MJ. (2007) Patient safety ethics and human error management in ED contexts Part II: accountability and the challenge to change. Australas Emerg Nurs J 2007; 10(2): 80–85
Khushf G, Raymond J and Beaman C. (2008). The Institute of Medicine’s reports on quality and safety: paradoxes and tensions. HEC Forum 2008; 20(1): 1–14.
Runciman W, Hibbert P, Thomson R, et al. (2009) Towards an international classification for patient safety: key concepts and terms. Int J Qual Health Care 2009; 21(1): 18–26.
Sherman H, Castro G and Fletcher M. (2009) Towards an international classification for patient safety: the conceptual framework. Int J Qual Health Care 2009; 21(1): 2–8
World Health Organization (WHO) (2012). What is patient safety? www. who.int/patientsafety/en/ (2012, accessed October 2012).
